The New Year is when everyone enjoys their Christmas gifts and one of mine was a small pocket sized book called ‘Try Again, Fail Again, Fail Better’ from my wife Lori. Its 67 palm-sized pages are adversity related quotations juxtaposed with related stories of illustration and inspiration.
The stories recount enriching and ironic failures from the lives of Jimmy Carter, Elvis Presley, Michael Jordan, Walt Disney, Thomas Edison, Orville Wright, Robert Goddard, Fred Astair, Oscar Hammerstein, Babe Ruth, Winston Churchill, Vincent Van Gogh, F.W. Woolworth, Abraham Lincoln, R. Buckminster Fuller, Donald Trump, Chris Goodyear, Jack London, Orson Welles and Samuel Beckett.
Many of those quotes featured I have already cited in my various postings, but favourite new quotes in the book include…
- “We are all failures – at least, the best of us are.” – J.M. Barrie
- “Failure seldom stops you. What stops you is fear of failure.” – Jack Lemmon
- “Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
- “You may not realise it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.” – Walt Disney
- “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas Edison
- “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” – Robert Kennedy
- “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” – Henry Ford
- “There is no failure. Only feedback.” – Robert Allen
- “He who have never failed somewhere, that man cannot be great. Failure is the true test of greatness. And if it be said, that continual success is a proof that a man wisely knows his powers – it is only to be added, that, in that case, he knows them to be small.” – Herman Melville
- “A fall from the third floor hurts as much as a fall from the hundredth. If I have to fall, may it be from a high place.” – Paulo Coelho
- “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” – G.K. Chesterton
- “Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavour.” – Truman Capote
- “It’s not that I am so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” – Albert Einstein
- “There is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life.” – Thomas Henry Huxley
- “If I had select one quality, one personal characteristic that I regard as being most highly correlated with success, whatever the field, I would pick the trait of persistence. Determination. The will to endure to the end, to get knocked down 70 times and get off the floor saying, ‘Here comes number 71!” – Richard M. Devos
- “We only think when we are confronted with a problem.” – John Dewey
- “My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.” – Abraham Lincoln
- “Failure? I never encountered it. All I ever met were temporary setbacks.” – Dottie Waters
- “There can be no freedom without the freedom to fail.” – Erich Fromm
- “Learning starts with failure; the first failure is the beginning of education.” – John Hersey
- “We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake, never made a discovery.” – Samuel Smiles
- “Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again next time.” – H.L. Menken
- “It would not be better if things happened to men just as they wish.” – Heraclitus
- “There is much to be said for failure. It is more interesting than success.” – Max Beerbohm
- “A life spent making mistakes is not only more honourable but more useful that a life spent doing nothing.” – George Bernard Shaw
- “To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail…” – Samuel Beckett
- “A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.” – Gertrude Stein
